by Jane Bradley
I watched the house, tried to imagine what they’d found: the pot in the trash can, the pills wrapped in plastic in the toilet tank, the stash in the box of Hungry Jack Pancake Mix. It took time to search a house. I tried to count the police cars in the driveway, watched the pulsing red and blue lights, listened to the radio static breaking up the air of my yard. I saw them lead her outside, and toward the white unmarked car with gleaming headlights. I couldn’t tell who else they were taking, couldn’t see if they were arresting all of them, even taking Sally and Glenn away for living in a disorderly house. I listened to the sound of police radio voices, engines revving, and the quiet dead grating sound of gravel under tires as they pulled out, the headlights piercing the dark narrow road as they drove away.
Slipping through the crack in the door, I moved toward the hedge and squeezed through the gate. I went to the side of the house, hid in the bushes, and listened for a sound inside. I heard Ruby’s voice saying, “It’s all right. Don’t worry, Glenn. They’ve gone away.”
I heard a car and saw it crawl around the wooded curve, one last unmarked car, slowly passing, and followed by the shape and low rumbling sound of my daddy’s truck. I sat in the dirt, and cried as I saw the red taillights flicker like demon eyes as he braked beyond the house, rolling down the steep dark hill.
I went in and saw the shattered room. I saw Ruby rubbing Glenn’s shoulders as he sat on the dining room table, leaning against her, letting her stroke the back of his head. They looked up, and we stared at each other without saying a word, surrounded by torn cushions, tipped chairs, broken dishes, and curtains pulled from rods. I moved through to the kitchen, felt them watch me as if I were a ghost, returning to see where the battle was fought and how the enemy had won.
“What happened?” I said.
Ruby shook her head as Glenn sat on the dining room table, propped up, stiff and blank as a toy. “They took her,” Ruby said.
I watched Glenn chew his lip. “And they took Ronnie and Sally too.”
“Sally?” I asked wondering why they would take a thirteen-year-old girl. I yelled at Ruby, “Why didn’t they take you?” wishing she would sink suddenly in a hole and disappear. She was the one who had taught Momma how to sell drugs. “Why didn’t they take you?” I said again. I wanted to beat her, smash her into a wall and pound her face.
“They sold to a narc,” Ruby answered. “The pigs didn’t find anything. They just came in, tore things up, and took them to jail.”
“Who’s the narc?” I said, my memory scanning all the faces that had passed through my house. It would have to be someone we thought was a friend if Sally had sold him drugs. “Bastard.” I kicked my foot against a chair, picked it up, and threw it across the room. Glenn let out a cry and started sobbing. I jumped to hold him, pushed Ruby aside, and hugged him, whispering, “I’m sorry, baby. Don’t worry. It’s okay.”
Ruby took a joint from her pocket, lit it up, shrugged at me, and walked away. I watched her face squinch as she inhaled, held her breath, and shook the match out with a quick jerk of her hand.
I pulled Glenn toward me. “Come on back to bed and try to get some sleep.” But he sat, stiffly, as if glued to the table. “Come on,” I said. “You hungry?” He looked up. “Come to the kitchen, and I’ll make hot chocolate and a peanut butter–jelly sandwich. Would you like that?” We watched Ruby walk out the front door to smoke her joint on the stoop.
I took him under the arms, scooted him off the table, and helped him figure out where to step across the scattered mess on the floor.
In the kitchen I picked up a saucepan, rinsed it in the sink, filled it halfway with cold milk, and put it on the stove. Glenn stood with his arms crossed over his chest, watching the cold milk heat as I looked for peanut butter, jelly, and the bread.
I turned to him and asked, “Do you want me to cut off the crust?” I held the slice of bread in front of him. “The crust, you want me to cut off the crust?” No answer. “Tell me. Do you want little triangles sandwiches or a fold-over?” He took the bread and folded it, bit a hole out of the middle, opened it, looked at the hole, and stared back at me.
I got the peanut butter and chocolate syrup from the cabinet. “We’ll have a nice snack,” I said as if I were talking to a deaf stranger and not my brother, Glenn. I put the peanut butter jar in front of him, opened it, and handed him a spoon. He had always liked to eat peanut butter from the jar. But he only gripped the spoon in his hand and watched. I swirled the chocolate syrup in the milk seeing the color change. Lowering the heat, I turned to him. “I’ll make a fold-over,” I said. I slapped the peanut butter and jelly on the bread with his spoon, folded it over and put it in his hand. I found two cups and poured out the steaming chocolate milk. “Careful, let it cool.” He sipped his hot chocolate, and I watched his eyes lower against the steam as his face disappeared behind the cup’s rim. I knew then it would be our last late night snack.
Imagine a dark hall, gray concrete walls, naked bulbs hanging on black wire, a dirt brown linoleum floor worn in the center, dust collecting in the corners along the grimy line between brown floor and gray wall. I didn’t want to look up to the light above me, fearing I’d see women caged like in the movies, locked and yipping, howling like abandoned dogs. I walked, kept my eyes on the floor, went down concrete steps, turned a corner into another hallway. “Wait here,” the guard said, pointing to a rough wooden bench in front of a thick green metal screen. She walked away, and I sat, looking at the green metal cage. I tried to see in it but saw nothing beyond the dark holes. “Mom?” I said. Nothing. Just the distant clanking sounds of metal doors, footsteps, buzzers, and bells.
I saw a crack of light as a door on the other side of the screen opened. A guard prodded my mother in. When the door closed, I saw only the shadowed shape of her shoulder and her long, thick, dark hair.
“Momma.”
“Shirley,” she said, tired mostly and also, I could hear, annoyed.
I went to the screen, put my hands across it, hoping she’d put her palm up and try to feel me through the screen the way they did in movies. But she just sat there in the dark. “Are you all right?” I leaned closer. “Momma?”
“I’m all right,” she said. “It’s cold here. We’ve got bugs too. You know how I hate bugs.”
I was crying. “Momma, why did you do this?”
“Stop it,” she answered. “You know damn well your daddy did this to me.”
He didn’t, he didn’t, I wanted to scream. But I knew he did. I had seen the truck, knew he had clued the cops onto my mother to get back for her lover, her life. But I also knew my mother sold the drugs, got my sister Sally to do it, told us all to sell to help buy groceries and pay the bills. I tried to see the woman I called my mother behind that dark screen and wondered what would Shirley Temple do in a situation like this? I sucked in gulps of air until finally I could open my mouth without screaming. “Do you need anything?” I asked.
“Out,” she said. “I need out of my goddamned life.”
I listened to the distant sound of guards talking, the sound of buzzers, keys, my mother’s breath.
“Don’t talk crazy, Momma. Nobody really wants to die.”
She sobbed, bent over, and cried the hard high crying sounds of a girl. “Your daddy did this,” she wailed. “Your daddy did this to me.”
Imagine a tiny garden, six by six feet, a tomato plant, some broccoli, Brussels sprouts, potatoes, parsley, a few stalks of corn that I harvested too soon. I ate the two-inch ears, crunching raw and sweet, standing there in the yard. My garden was fed with organic mulch from the compost heap, and protected from bugs by my homemade mix of vinegar, garlic and cayenne pepper. I was a vegetarian and pure. I did yoga, rhythmic breathing, and chanted a mantra twice a day to keep myself intact.
I told no one that my mother was in Nashville at a state penitentiary serving her seven-year time. I was sixteen, alon
e in a falling down house, rotting window frames propped in place with boards, ice forming inside the glass on cold nights, the ceiling sagging in the bedroom.
It was the man I called my daddy’s house, but he let me live there, the way somebody lets a rabbit live in the bushes of their backyard. I lived there, carefully and quietly, knowing any minute that he could come take it away. I stayed, grateful day to day for a house, my doll’s house, my underground house above land. I put plastic over the broken window and stuffed rags in the cracks around the frames. I worked after school at the Woolworth’s soda fountain, making sundaes, serving sandwiches and hard frozen, greasy, crinkle-cut French fries.
I still slept with a butcher knife locking my door. I had a life, my life, was no doll now to be picked up, played with, and put back on a shelf. I washed my clothes in the bathtub, hung them on the line outside on warm days or strung them over the heater in my room when it was cold. My house, my laundry, my bed, my kitchen, my life.
My daddy sometimes came to the soda fountain where I worked. He never sat at the counter with Sally and Glenn who always plopped down immediately and fumbled with the sugar packets, arranging them in squares and rows only to scoop them up again and shove them in the little wire holder when he gave them the signal that it was time to go. He stood behind them, gave the order for two chocolate milkshakes to go. I always made them myself, extra thick, with a little added whipped cream and a cherry on top. Glenn and Sally liked that. They always took their shakes with both hands, looked at me and smiled. He had the money ready. Then leaving he always left me a ten-dollar tip. I wouldn’t meet his eyes as I shoved the bill in my pocket. I could see too well the man who had chased my brother around the house, my brother screaming, “No I don’t want to go with you! I want my momma! I want to stay home.” Daddy had chased Glenn like a dog that had broken loose from its chain. He ran after him yelling, “She’s in jail, goddamn it. Now stop this shit and get in that truck!”
I had packed Glenn’s things in a brown grocery bag like Daddy told me to do. I folded and stacked his jeans, T-shirts, underwear, toothbrush, his stuffed monkey named Wamby. I sat on the porch with the bag filled to the brim, Wamby’s soft furred head resting against my knee and watched Glenn run in circles until Daddy yanked him up, held him like a sack of potatoes at his side, then shoved him in the truck and slammed the door. “Give me his stuff, Shirley,” he called. I ran to him with the paper bag bouncing against my chest, and I held it close, hugged it and tried to breathe the smell of it before I lifted it to his hands. He shoved the bag between them in the truck. He ignored Glenn who was sobbing into his fists. He didn’t look at me as he climbed into the truck and shut the door. He frowned, jerked the ignition, revved the engine, and turned to look down the drive as he backed out and drove away. He took Glenn and didn’t bother to ask where Ruby was, or if she’d stick around to take care of me. He left as if I were a grown-up, as if that falling down house were mine to pay for when something broke.
So I wouldn’t meet his eyes. I looked only at the money and the thick calloused hand that pushed it across the counter until I picked it up. I said nothing until I heard Sally say, “Bye, Shirley.”
I watched them walk away until they disappeared behind the shelves of the store, thinking: Yes, go on. That’s what I want. Leave me alone.
Four
When my mother went to prison she said she had her first out-of-body experience. The guards led her across the prison yard on a narrow sidewalk, and she saw her building ahead, a low flat red brick place. She felt the two matrons beside her, could hear the whoosh of cloth rubbing on the fat one’s thighs. Then she said she simply stepped back and up a little, floating somehow, walking between them the same as ever and yet floating above. She looked down, saw the dandruff sticking to the thick oily brown hairs on one head, and on the other saw the stretched stiff fabric of her navy hat. She said she felt fine then, peaceful, big as the world. She said it happened all the time while she was locked up in Nashville, and she wasn’t even doing drugs, not a drink, nothing but aspirin for her backache sometimes. She called it liberation as if it were a spiritual thing. But I knew desperation when she told it. I knew that numb panic, the pain that becomes so thick and heavy it spills over your senses and pushes you out of your own skin. I never told her what I thought, never said, you were unhappy, Momma. You were going out of your head.
I knew because I’d been there. I’d lived as a ghost watching the world move by, no more substantial than a curling column of warm steam or a thick damp breeze. I’ve been a ghost in the foreign world of the living ones who seem to have had a map of life in their heads. Sometimes I’d feel the presence of the world, like something vaguely remembered, recognizing a few living moments, like going home on a metro and recalling that back at the waiting platform I had seen a familiar face in the crowd.
I know why the ghosts wail. They have been robbed and lack the body that could grab hold and take something back. They hold nothing, are reduced to thin cries and moans most will mistake for rain, or wind, some familiar, natural sound. A ghost is robbed, senses stripped, soul abandoned, cut off from its body like a decapitated chicken, the body flapping its wings. It runs in circles, blood gushing from the wound, while the head lies in the grass, separate, watching it all from a distance, eyes blinking, dead, but without knowing its life is already gone.
I knew that my mother in prison was a dead ghost, not floating free. In pain, she stepped out of herself and told herself she was above and beyond the ground, the brick, the fence, the wall. But I knew that if she had to go back and feel it all again, she would refuse to take on that body of pain.
I know that free-floating numb bubble of a self that hovers safe and distant. I know the distance from pain when you are already dead. I have felt the slow swelling rise away from myself, suddenly so big and light and peaceful watching the wretch down there struggling to sleep and rest. The big self hovers like Glenda, the good witch, in her soft bubble of light, kisses the poor child’s forehead for luck, says to take comfort in charms: the kiss of a witch and the dead woman’s stolen shoes. And the little self, trapped, glued to the ground by gravity, says, “Yes, I’ll go on,” because that is all she can do. Chin up, eyes forward, feet moving on.
I could never help but slip my bare feet into my mother’s shoes. Clomp, clomp, my toes pinched down for leverage against all that extra sliding space, knees wobbling in her heels. I would sneak in her closet, breathe the scent of wool and perfume on her dresses, the leather smell of belts and purses. I liked the slight sweat stink, the faint human odor rubbed deep in the lining of her soles. I liked the aquamarine heels best; they glimmered and glowed, felt sleek and slick as oil in my hands. I pulled them out, slipped them on, and stood to admire my longer legs. I stuck my fingers in the gap in the back to measure the distance between me and my mother, and I’d stretch my feet to try to make them grow.
At sixteen I lived alone with only mice, roaches, and one wild cat. I never knew its name, but called it Momma Cat because her belly was huge and tight swinging wide and low to the ground when she walked. I had seen her mating one night in the yard under the porch light, screaming and yowling in what I thought must be pain. He crouched over her, gripping her shoulders with his claws tearing at the back of her neck, and she writhed against him, muscles clenching, screaming out. They clutched, clung, and wrestled, like those lizards I had seen before, procreating, copulating, making love. They yowled until finally he’d had enough and jerked out, tearing her inside as she fought against a penis designed to penetrate, ejaculate, and tear out only at his will. He leapt from her without looking back. She skulked, walked low, tail swishing, eyes bright. She growled and kept glancing back toward the darkness where he had run. Then slowly her legs stretched as she stood a little taller with each step, feeling the freedom of her muscles moving with her own will. She straightened up, glared, then suddenly, she ran.
Momma Cat was a wild thing
that lived on what she could catch, scavenge, and steal. She grew fatter, surviving somehow on the cans of cat food I brought when I had the extra change. She managed. Cats do. As I did, as anybody, she did the best she could.
Then she ate her babies. I never saw it happen, just the bone and fur remained scattered on the floor each day I came in from school. I stood in the kitchen and put my school books on the counter, then saw it in the corner: a tiny furred head, eyes gouged out, skin peeled back on white bone, veins dangling like colored wires where a neck could have been.
Momma Cat skulked out of her closet, haunches bone thin, big round wild yellow eyes, ears back. She circled the skull then swatted it across the floor, looked up at me, then walked out the open door.
Only possession could make a mother eat her babies. I thought a doctor might give me another reason. But I never asked anyone. Possession. I knew the signs. My cat ate all her babies, and I just swept the parts up daily into the dustpan, and carried them to the woods. I never said a word to anyone. I was too ashamed.
When my mother died the doctor said her bones were so thin they didn’t show up on the X-rays. I wondered what had held her up? The woman had no bones. What held her? Habit? Denial? Will?
Her bones had leeched away with the loss of calcium. Her womb, kidneys, bladder, stomach, intestines had all slowly filled with cancer, rotted away, and left her, a dry-skinned casing of blood, fluid, a heart that kept pounding, and a brain that kept making plans. She held the world in her clawed grip, insisting: “Goddamn it, I’m still alive!”
She had told me once when I was a girl that she’d die young, that her family was doomed. Then she promised, “But don’t worry, Shirley, even after I’m dead I’ll be around you. Your momma will be right there every second of the day.”
“No,” I said, “I don’t want you hanging around me dead.” Then she pushed me from her lap, shoved me from the rocker as if I were an insect that had looked harmless but suddenly stung. She reached for her drink and a magazine. “Go outside and play,” she said without looking up to see my face.